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In the acknowledgments of his new book, John Irving explains that each of his novels has begun with a "What If ...’’ The "What If ..." of "The Fourth Hand" (Random House, 313 pages, $26.95) was posed by Irving’s wife after she saw a TV news segment about the first hand transplant. "What if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand?" she asked. And so, Patrick Wallingford was born. Patrick, a handsome TV news reporter, soon becomes known as "the lion guy" after his hand is chomped off by a lion. He was in India at the time, filming a story about a trapeze artist who falls 80 feet to land in her husband’s arms. Her fall kills him. (The book has many such bizarre little twists that add texture.) Patrick more than makes up for his missing hand with his massive libido, and cheats on his wife. "The Fourth Hand" is not Irving’s best, but it is a successful character study of a man who at first is dubbed "unchallenging," but whose disability becomes the best thing that ever happened to him. Most of his transformation occurs when he meets Doris Clausen, the widow of the hand donor. In yet another of Irving’s quirky incidents, Doris had decided long before her husband died to give his hand to "the lion guy" after seeing the incident on television. Doris, who desperately wants to have a child, turns things around on Patrick by immediately seducing him. Patrick falls deeply in love with her, but she is more in love with her dead husband’s hand than with its current owner. But Patrick gained something more substantial than a left hand. "It was both loving and losing Mrs. Clausen that had given Patrick his soul. It was both his longing for her and the sheer wishing her well...’’ His desire and unrequited love for Doris transforms him from a cookie-cutter, blow-dried TV newsman to a man with heart. He begins to see his back-stabbing co-workers in a new light and notices the crassness of his network. Patrick begins to strive for something more, and dreams of a life with Doris. Possibly the only weakness in the book is its subplot about Patrick’s surgeon. The story of the gaunt, divorced Dr. Zajac, who falls in love with his housekeeper, is amusing, but it’s overshadowed by Patrick’s story and the two never quite mesh. The book would not have suffered without it — particularly if Irving excised all the pooper-scooper lacrosse jokes. The strength of the book lies in Patrick’s growth. Early on, Irving writes: "In the company of crying women, Patrick Wallingford did what many men do — he thought of other things.’’ By the end, Patrick is a man who dreams of waking up with Doris in her family’s lakeside cottage, their bathing suits hanging side by side on the clothesline.
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